Post #2888413

2026-05-26 21:48 UTC

still too early to pass any judgement but I'm giving https://search.waterfox.com/ a try and ... it seems decent? it's a $5/mo search engine which uses Google's index but explicitly advertises as not having any AI features if you've been eyeing kagi but don't want to give your money to an "AI" company, might be worth a look? in the long run obviously we need a real solution that doesn't tie us to hostile megacorps that want to leave us all subservient, but this might help tide us over until we can get that sorted out (but yeah google's index is not going to last forever)

Replies (2)

@technomancy@hey.hagelb.org 2026-05-27 04:05

so the impression I get is that searx is like ... the GNU Social of free search; it's a precursor that represents an early shot at replacing the existing megacorp offering with something independent but it's not really usable as a serious replacement unless you are ideologically dedicated to avoiding the big bad one https://docs.searxng.org/ I don't really want to use searx; I want to use the Mastodon of search--well, no, I want to use the Gotosocial of search--but the Mastodon of search doesn't exist yet and is going to be written by someone who's using the GNU Social of search, and the Gotosocial of search is going to be written by someone who's using the Mastodon of search so I should probably at least poke around and get comfortable with it to see what they are up to

Open ##2888412
@varx@infosec.exchange 2026-05-26 23:57

@technomancy@hey.hagelb.org For what it's worth, Kagi feels like less of an AI company than even DDG. It doesn't shove AI summaries in your face and the chatbot is entirely opt-in. But I acknowledge that the guy is at least a little bit sketchy. (I also currently find the Kagi search results better than Google's.)

Open ##4227324